Internet text retrieval systems accept a statement for requested information in terms of a search query S made up of a plurality of keywords T1, T2, . . . Ti, . . . Tn and return a list of documents that contain matches for the search query terms. To facilitate the performance of such searches on internet databases, search engines have been developed that provide a query interface to the information containing sources and return search results ranked sequentially on how well the listed documents match the search query. The effectiveness in obtaining desired results varies from search engine to search engine. This is particularly true in searching certain product support databases which can be heavily weighted with technical content and the queries tend to be repetitive. In such databases, information can be in a number of natural languages, both in analog and digital form, and in a number of different formats, and in multiple machine languages. The relevancy of the search results depends on many factors, one being on the specificity of the search query. If the search query was specific enough, the probability of getting relevant results is generally higher. For example, the probability of getting documents on ‘Java exception handling’ is higher for the query ‘Java exception’ than for the query ‘exception’. At the same time, some relevant documents may be excluded by a specific search query, because the query does not contain certain combinations of terms, contains superfluous terms or address the same subject matter using different words. For instance, as shown in FIG. 1, if the query is ‘video player for PC’, the search engine may not be able to find and return relevant documents that are not about personal computers and/or instead of using ‘video player’ contain terms like ‘DVD driver’ or ‘multimedia software’. Approaches to broaden searches by adding synonymous search terms and disregarding bad query terms are known. However, results using these known approaches have not been entirely satisfactory in turning up relevant documents and/or require additional real time examination of database logs and/or databases.
Therefore it is an object of the present invention to provide an improvement in search engine search results.
Another object of the present invention is to broaden search results to uncover relevant documents that do not contain requested query terms.
It is further an object of the present invention to provide requested information to searchers in selected technical areas.